The Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents (GFF) is a multi-stakeholder global partnership housed at the World Bank that is committed to ensuring all women, children and adolescents can survive and thrive. Launched in July 2015, the GFF supports 36 low and lower-middle income countries with catalytic financing and technical assistance to develop and implement prioritized national health plans to scale up access to affordable, quality care for women, children and adolescents. The GFF also works with countries to maximize the use of domestic financing and external support for better, more sustainable health results. The GFF is squarely focused on prioritizing and scaling up evidence-driven investments to improve reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and nutrition through targeted strengthening of primary health care systems – to save lives and as a critical first step toward accelerating progress on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The GFF has pioneered a shift from traditional development approaches to a more sustainable way forward where governments lead and bring global partners together to support a prioritized, costed national plan. Through this partnership, the GFF aims to mobilize additional funding through the combination of grants from a dedicated multi-donor trust fund (the GFF Trust Fund), financing from International Development Association (IDA) and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the crowding in of additional domestic and external resources. This approach has catalyzed high-impact investments for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and nutrition in the world’s most vulnerable countries.